Kabumpo in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
I owned all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books growing up, and read them all many times. I only owned two Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, her last two canonical ones (which we will come to eventually, I suppose). Hers were not very commonly reprinted after their original Reilly & Lee editions. I did, however, read them all, or at least most of them: my mother helped middle-school me navigate the dial-up catalogue of the 1990s in order to request them all through interlibrary loan! That said, I have absolutely no memory of most of them; the titles don't even spark slight chords of memory in my mind. So, rereading them to my three-year-old son is more akin to reading them for the first time.
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| Originally published: 1922 Acquired and read aloud: June 2022 |
Kabumpo in Oz has a couple parallel plots. In one, the old Nome King (or "Gnome King," as Thompson spells it), Ruggedo, has regained his memory since the events of Magic of Oz and has carved out a "kingdom" for himself underneath the Emerald City... a kingdom with just two subjects, a rabbit named Wag (for whom Ruggedo steals shiny things from the city) and a wooden doll named Peg Amy (which Ruggedo stole from Trot). Ruggedo finds a boxed of "mixed magic" buried under the Emerald City, which he uses to bring Peg Amy to life, and then to enlarge Peg Amy, Wag, and... himself! Because he's standing under Ozma's palace when this happens, he ends up with the palace on his giant head and he freaks out and runs away to Ev. This interrupts a party Dorothy is having, meaning that her, along with Scraps, the Scarecrow, Tik-Tok, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Sir Hokus, and Ozma, are all trapped in the palace on the head of the old Nome King.
Meanwhile, Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink, a tiny kingdom in the Gillikin Country, is having his tenth eighteenth birthday party (since people in Oz don't age) when the cake explodes. A magic scroll declares that if he doesn't marry a "proper fairy princess," Pumperdink will disappear. His father wants to marry him off to an old fairy crone who is the princess of a nearby magic forest, but Kabumpo the Elegant Elephant, a favorite in the court of Pumperdink, thinks that the only fairy princess in Oz good enough for Pompa is Ozma herself, and so Pompa and Kabumpo sneak out of Pumperdink in the middle of the night to go to the Emerald City and ask for Ozma's hand in marriage.
They have some adventures on the way, and by the time they get there, of course, Ozma's palace is gone, so they go on a quest with Wag and Peg Amy to retrieve the palace and defeat Ruggedo—an action they hope will prove that Pompa is worthy of Ozma's hand, even if by this point his fancy clothes are in tatters and his hair all got burnt off by a well-meaning living candle in the Illumi Nation.
I really liked this. Thompson's trademark puns come a bit thick and fast at times and often go over the head of my son (e.g., they meet living numbers, who don't have heads for figures, but do have figures for heads), but the characters work. Pompa is quiet and unassuming but has a nobility to him; Peg Amy is kind and can deflate the pomposity of anyone she meets; Wag is passionate and impetuous; Kabumpo is pretentious but ultimately well-meaning. The three non-human characters were all fun to read aloud.
Especially once all four are adventuring together, they make a great group. I liked the bickering between Kabumpo and Wag, and the way Peg Amy could calm Kabumpo down. In Royal Book, Thompson mostly stuck to Baum's characters as protagonists (with the exception of Sir Hokus), but here, she shows she can make her own characters that feel that they belong in Oz every bit, but also aren't the kind of characters Baum would write. Questing princes are a traditional fairy tale trope that Baum wasn't interested in for the Oz books. (Rinkitink aside, but I guess that wasn't meant to be an Oz book.)
The plotting might be a bit contrived. It takes days for Pompa and Kabump to get to the Emerald City, and then to Ev, so Thompson has to keep the Emerald City characters out of the action because otherwise they could easily solve their own problems. Basically, at the exact moment they begin making headway, the Sandman happens to trip over Ozma's palace and spill sleep sand everywhere, meaning everyone (bar the Scarecrow, Scraps, and Tik-Tok, of course) sleeps until Pompa shows up to save them. But, to be honest, I was entertained along the way, and I never minded.
What makes the book really work is the last few chapters. Ozma turning down Pompa's proposal is a moment both hilarious and touching; Kabumpo in particular is anguished. Doesn't she know how these kind of stories work? A princess can't turn down a prince who saves her! Is it Pompa's hair? The group consults the magic question box contained in the assortment of mixed magic, and it tells them that Pompa's "proper princess" is actually the Princess of Sun Top Mountain, a small kingdom in the Winkie Country.
The book has an emotional climax—something that I honestly don't think Baum ever even attempted in his Oz novels. As Pompa approaches Sun Top Mountain, he begins to mourn that he won't be able to go adventuring with his newfound friends anymore. Thompson has really succeeded in making their bond seem meaningful, so this is genuinely melancholic. The trip into Sun Top Mountain is kind of eerie, and as Pompa professes that he loves Peg Amy, he finds out that she (for somewhat complicated reasons) is the princess of Sun Top Mountain. It's a really well done moment of emotional catharsis.
For me, it elevates what was a good Oz novel into a great one, and my son had a pretty big reaction to the revelation of Peg Amy's true identity, too. He seemed to enjoy the novel on the whole; you can't do wrong by an elephant! He was already asking me if we would read about Kabumpo, Pompa, and company in future novels. (Thompson uses Kabumpo as co-protagonist in several of her novels, though I don't think Pompa and Peg Amy ever have a big role again. We'll see I guess!)
Books of Wonder may have done all the Baum novels as hardcover facsimiles, but they only did two of Thompson's, the only two with color plates that were in the public domain in the 1990s. (The other was Royal Book of Oz, which I owned as a Dover already, so I didn't upgrade.) It was published in 1998, and the copy I bought direct from the publisher is a first printing, indicating that these probably didn't sell very well; compare my copy of, say, the Books of Wonder Lost Princess, also originally published in 1998, where my new copy is an eleventh printing. Little wonder, I suppose, that even though many more Thompson Oz novels with color plates have come into the public domain the past few years, Books of Wonder hasn't done any more facsimiles. The demand just isn't there, alas.
So here, for now, is my complete collection of Books of Wonder facsimiles:
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| The inconsistent presence of spine numbers is a bit annoying. And why did Kabumpo use a different spine design than the Baums? It's not Books of Wonder's fault, though, that my supposed "like new" copy of Emerald City from Amazon Marketplace lacked a dust jacket. |
It does seem a shame that now I'm missing just two Baums in this format. Maybe I will go back someday and upgrade my Dovers anyway.
Next up in sequence: The Cowardly Lion of Oz
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